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Foreign influence, Brexit and social media

Having been on twitter since 2007, also worked/ing in online collaboration in a professional context and I voted Remain btw and would again…

My country and especially the US have wasted an opportunity to use social and mainstream media for positive online international collaboration. It’s easy to say this now but it would have been very useful to have had official expert briefings from the governments in countries like Russia, China, Japan, India, Iran, Turkey etc on how they thought UK choosing Brexit might affect them. These could also have been provided via social media and maybe even fun. I believe this could have helped many people in their thinking processes, including older generations who have lived through the whole of our membership of the EU and the countries who have lived with the consequences of our development alongside this – positive or negative.

Unfortunately the decisions that US & UK government and particularly the investors in Silicon Valley companies make and the influence they already use online mean that these countries would never have been given a fair online platform in order to interact with UK citizens in a constructive way – and the way things are going never will.

I was one of the naive cheerleaders at one point so I’m as guilty as anyone. Everyone has been misled / mis-sold a vision of what a connected world can achieve by technology companies and technologists in universities and governments in a developed countries. And now those very people are intent on dragging citizens down an increasingly narrow-minded path – mostly aimed at changing those governments to one that suits their interests regardless of any devastating consequences for citizens in those countries. Diversity including foreign influence is a good thing and online collaboration can be positive but not using platforms and strategies that promote international inequality.